


Protectors of the Realms

by Oreramar



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Faerie Alteans and Galra, Gen, Medieval AU, Robin Hood AU, fairyland au, human paladins, myth elements selected and blended at will
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-24
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-26 12:44:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7574500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oreramar/pseuds/Oreramar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Faerie folk haven't been seen by human eyes in untold generations - they are myths, old wives tales, the stuff of superstition and fireside songs. But of late there have been mysterious disappearances, taxes and tithes beyond what has been usual for local lords and churches, and a growing legend of five inhumanly swift and strong warriors in the forest, warriors who appear from nowhere, steal these tithes, and vanish again like ghosts...</p><p> </p><p>(Or: The Voltron medieval/magical/robin-hood-esque AU I wanted to read and had to write.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The forest road was dark and silent; they moved in a tiny island of lantern light and jangling harnesses. Eight mounted guards surrounded a covered cart, the wood banded with iron, and their eyes never stopped moving from shadow to shadow.

The cart driver kept his own eyes fixed on his horse’s neck, bobbing ahead of him. His hands were tight on the reins, and he chewed furiously at the battered stalk of grass dangling from his mouth. They hadn’t heard birdsong in too long a stretch, and he had the terrible feeling that if he looked to the shadows at all, something would look back.

He was the first to see the hesitation in the horses. The hesitation turned to outright balking, and before he could raise his voice, a hissing flash of blue light knocked the right front guard off of his horse.

“Ride!” the other guard commanded, and they charged onward, spurring their reluctant horses into flight. Another hiss and flash of blue knocked down another guard, then a third, and then the flashes came in yellow from the front, striking the road before them and exploding in clouds of dust and noise. The horses reared, bucked and sidled, refusing to go onward.

A cry to the left drew the driver’s attention. He saw a fourth guard dragged from his saddle by a hooded figure wearing red armor and wielding a similarly glowing sword. A fifth guard rode up, swinging his own blade down on the strange assailant; it was blocked in a ringing clash. On the right another hooded attacker appeared from thin air, this one smaller and armored in green, springing from ground to horseback to the shoulders of a flailing guard, a dagger trailing verdant light through the air. The carthorse danced in its harness, whinnying, and the driver gathered the reins. The dust on the road ahead was settling; no more shots had been fired there. They could run…

A tall man, hooded, cloaked, and armored in black in the manner of the others, stepped onto the path. His left hand reached for the horse’s tackle; he clicked his tongue and whispered to it. It calmed at his touch, ears flicking forward, focusing on him. The other hand came up, patting the horse’s mane, and the driver realized with a chill that this was no human hand but a thing of violet crystal, moving as though it were alive.

“Retreat!” cried one of the two guards still astride their horses. They wheeled around behind the cart and bolted. One fell to a bolt of blue, his horse galloping away without him. The other vanished into the forest gloom.

“You missed one!” shouted the red knight into the trees. The driver glanced fearfully back in time to see one in blue armor, clutching a short hunting bow, descend into the shallow pool of lantern light.

“So what? I still got more than you did.”

“You have a _bow_.”

“And I can only shoot one arrow at a time, so what’s your point?”

“Enough,” said the man in black, still patting the horse. “We got what we came for. That’s what’s important.”

“What about him?” asked the green one - a child, the driver thought; his voice rung too lightly to belong to a grown man. The black knight looked at the driver. He fought back a shudder; while the face under the hood seemed human, albeit scarred and too young for the white strands of hair hanging before it, he could not forget the unnatural hand upon the cart horse’s neck.

“What is your name?” the black knight asked. The driver’s mouth was dry. He answered more bravely than he felt.

“Nothing, to demons,” he said. The green knight scoffed.

“Is that what they’re calling us now?”

“Huh. I thought we were still ghosts of robbers haunting the path and taking new victims,” said a new voice. A large man approached from the road ahead, armored all in yellow with a hefty longbow over his shoulder. “Guess the story’s changed.”

“Wasn’t there that one rumor a bit ago - you know, about us being some kind of shapeshifters or something?” the blue archer spoke up from the back.

“That was just about the princess, not the rest of us,” said the red one. “I’m pretty sure we were just her hired thieves in that one.”

“All right, that’s not important right now,” said the black. He released the horse’s harness and walked toward the cart. The driver dropped the reins and pressed himself into the seat back, one hand fumbling for his traveling knife - though small and simply made, it was cold iron, as good a talisman as a weapon against otherworldly beings.

“Calm down. I promise, you’ll be fine. Lance?”

The driver hardly had time to blink before something struck him in the back and he pitched forward into the black knight’s waiting arms, and darkness.

 

-

 

“Well, at least you got that one,” Keith said as Shiro hefted the man out of the seat and settled him at the side of the road, blue light still shimmering over his back from Lance’s elfshot. Lance himself bristled indignantly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What do you think it means?”

“That’s enough, you two,” Shiro ordered, returning to the cart and checking under the cover tied over the back. “What’s done is done.”

“Yeah, and it wasn’t my fault anyhow! I mean, seriously, _you_ try shooting two different targets moving fast on horseback in the middle of the woods before they get out of range. It’s harder than you think!”

“And now they’ll _know_ that they’re not losing their cargo to regular run-of-the-mill bandits, or even to whatever story gets made up by the guards to save face,” Keith pressed. “They’re going to be more careful and better prepared from now on, which means _everything_ is going to get harder.”

“They definitely already suspected something,” Hunk pointed out from beside the cart. He tapped one of the bands of metal bolted to the sides. “Look, iron. Either this is the latest big thing in cart construction, or they’re starting to think that maybe whatever’s been hitting them lately isn’t human. Which, you know, isn’t accurate at all, but still, it goes to show that they are starting to think outside the usual box, which means someone’s noticed something about our hits at least. That or someone actually believed the ghost or shapeshifter stories. Could be that.”

“All we can do about any of this is take whatever happens as it does,” Shiro said, climbing up into the driver’s seat. Pidge hopped up beside him as he picked up the reins. The others clambered on and found perches on the back of the cart. The wood creaked under the weight, but it held together. “Time to get this back to Arus. Pidge, if you could…”

Pidge reached into a pouch at her waist and withdrew a small wooden case which flicked open on cleverly hidden hinges to reveal a tiny silver mirror. The reflection in it was not her own, but that of a fey face with bright eyes, dusky skin, and moonlight hair.

“We’ve got it, princess,” Pidge said. The reflection smiled.

“Wonderful work! I’m opening a portal at your location.”

The air tore apart in front of the horse, unfurling into a gate of darkness speckled by stars and edged in the glowing blue tone of a summer sky.

“Coming through,” Pidge reported. Shiro flicked the reins, and the horse paced placidly across the border between realms. The gate closed behind them, leaving behind nothing but the remains of a struggle and eight men, seven in guards’ armor, sleeping their memories of the day away.

 

-

 

_Once upon a time, very long ago, there was an accord between the worlds, and humanity and faeriekind were as friends and neighbors. Gifts were freely exchanged, as were favors, friendships, and family bonds, and the material wealth of the human world and the magical energies of elfland met and mingled in craft and trade alike._

_But there grew a schism between the elves of day and of night, and the balance suffered. Differences grew to tensions, and tensions to war, and the king of the light elves, the Altea, shut the gates between worlds so tightly that few could open them again, and never for long. Generations upon ages passed, and the peaceful accord faded from living memory, drifting into local legends of the mysteries of standing stones and dancing rings and the faintest remaining drops of faerie blood in the oldest families._

_No living human had seen elfland in all that time, and none knew of the war or how it went, until one day a year ago, when a young knight and the king’s physician vanished without a trace…_

_-_

“So, what’d we get in this one?” Lance asked, dropping onto the bench sans armor, a mug of Altean berry juice in his hand. He ached all over from unloading crates and chests from the cart for cataloguing; whatever had been in them had weighed a collective ton.

“Silver and flint, for the most part, and most of that was just raw material,” Hunk said, sitting down with a bowl of a gooey substance that Coran promised was an extremely nourishing Altean staple food. “A few particular types of crystal and other small gemstones which Coran said are really good at focusing certain kinds of magic. Some pots of grain and ale. There was also an invoice and a promise to send more soon.”

“How soon?”

Hunk shrugged. “All it said was ‘soon.’”

“Huh. You’d think an evil fairy force that’s conquered most of this realm would be a little better organized,” Lance replied, gulping down his juice. “But then, you’d also think they’d be a little more demanding. That cart wasn’t _that_ big. It can’t have fit very much stuff, and given the size of the Galra Empire at this point…”

“I don’t think they’re relying on these shipments for supplies,” Hunk replied, stirring his meal. Most of it just clung to the spoon and got dragged around the bowl that way. “Neither do Allura, or Coran, or Shiro. It seems more like a tithe or a tribute - a kind of token payment in return for _not_ just marching in and burning entire fifes to the ground.”

“So basically the Galra don’t _need_ this stuff, they just take it because they’re jerks. Yeah, that seems about right for them.”

“Thing is, they still can’t exactly march in and burn things down in reality, or else they would’ve done it by now,” Hunk added. “One or two can occasionally slip through gaps at just the right time and place - it’s how they collect the tithes - but they can’t just tear open massive portals and march columns through. Armies take a long time to move - time they don’t really have with the way things are. Which means that they probably have agents on the other side, and that these agents are probably in positions where they can convince people that it really is in their best interest to gather these resources and ship them off for ‘protection.’”

“Well that’s a nice thought,” Lance grimaced and finished off his juice. “And here I thought this was going to be easy. A few weeks, maybe a month or two, beat the bad guys and go home to a big parade, perhaps even a knighthood or something. Nope. Instead it’s hit and runs and stealing their stuff and figuring out that they’ve got hidden minions on our side of things as well. Great…on that happy note, I guess I’m going to bed.”

He took the mug over to the barrel of rainwater, swished it around, and hung it on a hook to dry before wandering toward the door. A lecture over keeping equipment clean was the last thing he wanted to deal with at this point.

“Shiro wants us up early tomorrow for redistribution scouting!” Hunk called after him. Lance waved over his shoulder to acknowledge the message before turning down the narrow stone corridor and out of Hunk’s view.

On the bright side - if there was a bright side, he mused - he was an official Paladin of fairy royalty. Nobody back home knew about it, of course, and they couldn’t know until all this was over, however long that might be, but it had to count for something.

 

-

 

None of them had the supernaturally light tread or touch of many of the fey folk, but they had learned to move quickly and quietly enough through the grey mists of pre-dawn that their birth made little enough difference. No one saw them come or go save the occasional wild bird anymore, and when the people rose with the sun there was no sign of their passage save what they left behind: pots of grain and drink and bags of silver, divided carefully according to need and use and the loss incurred by the taxes raised to produce it in the first place, left on doorsteps and windowsills and inside barns. And in each place, marked lightly in chalk or charcoal, a simple sigil in the form of an angular V - a promise of protection and shelter in time of need, the ancient rune of the Altean Paladins.

The true meaning of the mark had been long lost in human memory, but a new meaning was rising in the minds of the people who saw it, and that meaning was hope.

 

-

 

Darren stood at attention in the center of the room, his eyes staring straight ahead and his palms sweating. Bad enough he’d been the only one to escape, expecting to be shot from behind the entire ride back to town. Bad enough he’d been up half the night explaining their failure up the chain of command until the details blurred in his head and he wasn’t certain of his own sanity anymore. Bad enough he’d missed at least two meals in the last day yet had no appetite to accompany his undeniable hunger.

Bad enough, all of that, but now he had _this_ to weather.

Heavy bootsteps sounded behind him, then around his right, and he fought to keep his gaze level and not stare at the man who paced - prowled - into view. The commander was an imposing presence, tall and broad, with a patch covering his right eye, but what truly drew attention was his left arm.

Darren had heard all the barracks rumors about it. Crippled, cursed, crooked - whether by birth or accident or some evil force, it hardly mattered. Even under the armor he was never seen without, under the shrouding cloak thrown over his left side, there was something visibly misshapen about it, rising high at the shoulder and thick down the length of the limb.

He tried not to stare, but he couldn’t help a flicker of a glance, just to see it for himself.

“I understand,” said the Commander - Darren fixed his gaze hard on a knothole in the wood paneling across the room - “that you were the guard who escaped yesterday’s banditry in the forest.”

“Yes, sir,” Darren said when the pause made it clear that the Commander expected a response.

“That you abandoned your mission,” the man continued. “That you turned and ran when the odds seemed…overwhelming.”

“Y…yes, sir.”

“Ordinarily, I would have you stripped of your position and possibly imprisoned for dereliction of duty. Even now, I will not let this pass entirely. Still, I am willing to grant you a…minor…reprieve, if only because your actions have finally given us an eyewitness account of these attacks. I have heard of the reports you made to your own captains, but now I wish to hear it directly from you. Describe everything to me - what you saw, heard, felt - in detail. Leave nothing unsaid. Begin.”

Shaking in his boots, Darren did as ordered, describing the first shots fired, the bolts of blue light piercing the darkness and light armor of his cohorts alike, their attempt to charge out of range, the explosions on the road ahead. He spoke of the knights in red and green and their glowing blades, dancing through the air with what had seemed to be unnatural speed and agility in the chaos of the brief fight. He spoke of the brief glimpse he’d gotten of the one in black taking the bridle of their carthorse, calming it in moments. He had come to doubt his own eyes and memories in the many interrogations, but the gleam of the Commander’s one eye bored into him, and he feared leaving any detail out, no matter how he doubted it; he mentioned seeing the dark knight’s right hand glint in the dim light, more like a sparkling, multifaceted stone than living flesh or a metal gauntlet, in the moment before his last remaining companion had shouted for a retreat and he, terrified beyond thought, had followed him, passed him as a bolt of blue knocked him from his horse, and galloped on alone through the forest gloom.

“Is that all?” the Commander asked. Darren swallowed against his dry mouth and nodded. “Very well. Your testimony was enlightening. You will report to your immediate captain for three months of whatever menial duties and guard shifts he finds appropriate for a more…minor infraction. You are dismissed.”

Darren didn’t need to be told twice. He saluted, turned, and marched from the room as quickly as his trembling knees could carry him. The door swung shut behind him.

Left alone, the Commander spoke to empty air.

“Haxis, prepare the mirror. I need to report this to our Emperor.”

The air in the corner behind the door shimmered, and a dark fey shifted into view with a brief bow.

“At once, sir.”

As he waited, Commander Sendak allowed the glamour of humanity to slide away from his own form. If he was to contact the greatest of the Galra, he would prefer to do so wearing his own face. He entered his private chamber, sat at the small, seldom-used writing desk within, and accepted the small, well-enchanted silver mirror Haxis handed him.

“Emperor Zarkon,” he said, bowing his head in greeting to the image on the silvered glass, “I have news to report. There are new royal paladins of Altea. One is likely the Champion. And they are interfering in our business here.”

The order did not surprise him, but it was good to have it confirmed.

“Kill or capture them, but retrieve their armor and bayards above all else. This is now your first priority.”

Sendak smiled sharply.

“As you command, sire.”

The mirror went dark.

 

-

 

The problem with fighting humans equipped as faeries is that the strengths of one side so cleanly overlap the weaknesses of the other. Faerie armor and shields offered protection from the elfshot and other forms of fey magic humans were usually so susceptible to, and while forged iron and steel were detrimental to faeries in general this was more of a weakness of their race than of their workings - an unprepared fae would always flinch from the touch of a human blade no matter how well armed and armored they may be, but a human felt no chill from the metal, and so easily withstood its presence. Faerie armor drew strength from its wearer and gifted it back in new form, making them stronger, faster, swifter, more powerful.

The surviving princess of Alteans had indeed been clever in her choice of Paladins, Sendak mused. Clever, or perhaps desperate, because as neatly as human warrior and faerie kit dovetailed, in the end the Paladins were truly only human. With enough pressure, no matter how well they were outfitted, they would break.

All he had to do was press them hard enough and long enough to achieve that.

“Haxis, draft five bounties,” Sendak ordered after some thought. “Five hundred crowns for the successful capture or death of each Paladin, provided we be given a fully-equipped body as proof of identity in any case.”

“What of their descriptions?”

“Do what you can for now: the color and make of their armor and weapons, at least. If we learn more, it may be added then. But in addition, offer a bounty of twenty crowns for capture of the Champion - the knight Shirogane, as the humans know him - as a suspected corroborator of these thieves. Even if our guess is wrong and he is not in fact the Black Paladin, it would be good to regain him. His potential - for a human - pleased the Emperor greatly, as I recall.”

Haxis left to do as required, his illusory guise as a human soldier shimmering over his form.

Five hundred crowns each - a total of twenty-five hundred for all - was a reward beyond the imagining of most mortals, Sendak knew well. Faerie gold was worth far less, of course, but that would not be important to the humans who would answer its siren call. He didn’t expect any to truly succeed - not against five Paladins, however human and fresh to the post. What was most important was to simply make things difficult, to wear them down until they cracked.

With a reward such as this, it wouldn’t be long until the forest was crawling with bounty hunters and mercenaries. If their base was on this side of the realms, it may soon be rooted out, and if it was on the other, then they would face the same problem there. Sendak had contacts there who would make sure of it, likely in a similar, if perhaps slightly more costly, manner.

Then, when the time was right, when the Paladins were worn and weary, Sendak would be ready.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which bounties attract bounty hunters, and Lance is drawn in by a pretty face.

Certain places and times in the human realm are more closely connected to faerieland than others. Midnights, dawn and dusk, particular phases of the moon - especially in conjunction with the harvest or, more powerfully yet, with the solstices and equinoxes - circles of stones or trees or small wild mushrooms, glens and dells and the shadowed lees of old hills where magic pooled and collected in ancient times, where its imprint remains on the earth even after ages without renewal. In these particular places and times, given enough overlaps and enough static power in the air, it is possible to slide from one realm to the other without the active use of magic - sometimes without realizing it has happened at all.

The Paladins made use of one now, sliding into the world of mortals with hardly a ripple of disturbance to mark their passage.

“All right, remember the plan, and call if you run into trouble,” Shiro reminded them one last time to mixed acknowledgements. “Let’s go.”

Three went one way; Shiro and Lance went the other. Lance held the grip of his bayard in one hand, though it had not yet formed into a bow for his use. Shiro held his arm at the ready, growing more watchful and wary the closer they came to the source of one of the disturbances their warestones had detected that day. When he judged that they were close enough, he motioned to Lance, who nodded and slipped back behind Shiro’s periphery, ready to cover him at range.

Then Shiro crept nearer the mark and scanned the area from behind a wide-boled and well-leafed tree. It was near one of the smaller roads that ran through the wood, a cut often taken by merchants who weren’t keen to journey first to the castle and then further around the forest’s border to the next town in that direction. The Paladins normally paid little attention to these roads, except to watch and make sure the Galra weren’t trying to slip shipments this way and that thieves weren’t taking advantage of their growing legend to accost innocent travelers, but this blip had been motionless on their magical sensory net for far too long.

Shiro quickly saw why - it was a cart, pulled over to the side of the road, with horse unhitched and one wheel visibly damaged. A man and a woman sat beside it, staring into a sad campfire built in the cart’s shade. Still Shiro was cautious, scanning the area for any signs of hidden presences, guards or other travelers or traps waiting to be sprung…

“Hello, there! Need any help?”

Shiro jumped and bit back a curse, glaring at Lance as he sauntered out of cover with an eager, friendly smile, his weapon stashed and his hood down. Lance would be getting a lecture as soon as they got back; what was the point of having a bowman to support him when said bowman would abandon his post the moment he decided there was no immediate threat and a pretty face nearby to boot?

And of course Shiro had been visible when the strangers had looked up toward the shout, seizing up staves in preparation for self-defense, so there was no further point in hiding. He followed Lance with a sigh, though he still kept an eye on the surroundings, just in case.

“We could use a hand, sirs, if you’re willing,” said the man beside the fire, both travelers standing to face Lance and lowering their makeshift weapons. “I’m Rollo, and this is my sister Nyma. We’re glad to see friendly faces out here.”

“Charmed,” said Lance, giving his flirtiest bow. Shiro couldn’t see his face, but he was willing to bet that the boy had winked at the young woman, given the way she smiled and ducked her head into her hand to giggle. “I’m Lance, this is Shiro, and if there’s anything you need…”

“A new wheel would be great, but barring that miracle, we’ll take a patch job that’ll take us to the next town,” Rollo said, indicating the splintered rim of the cart wheel behind him. “I wouldn’t trust it with weight on these roads in this condition, not for that long and not with ghost bandits about, if the rumors are true.”

“I wouldn’t be too worried about ghost bandits if I were you. They don’t attack pretty ladies, or regular merchants for that matter.”

“So you’ve heard of them?” Nyma asked as Lance looked the wheel over.

“You could say that.”

“Lance,” Shiro said in warning.

“Have you ever _seen_ them?”

“Oh, lots of times. In fact, you _could_ say that we’re pretty close…”

“ _Lance_.”

“Ah, let them have a little fun,” Rollo said, coming up quietly by his side. “They’re young, and it’s just talk.”

“I’d think most brothers would be more protective of their sisters around strange men,” Shiro wondered. He wouldn’t know himself, but he’d heard stories and witnessed enough to suspect the norm.

Rollo simply shrugged.

“Well, then I guess we’re not like most siblings.”

“You two don’t look very alike,” Shiro observed.

“No, we don’t - truthfully, Nyma’s adopted. My parents took her in when we were both young. She’s as good as a sister, though, and a great help at the family business.” Rollo nodded to the cart. “Still, I’m glad you two showed up when you did. I was getting a little worried. You don’t hear much good about the sorts of things that linger in the woods at night.”

“Like ghosts?”

“Like whatever they are, or whatever other things there could be besides them. Ghosts, living men, maybe even the Good Neighbors walking out of my grandfather’s stories. For all I know, there could be. Course, if your friend there is telling the truth, then that’s at least one group off the list for worries, right?”

“At least,” Shiro agreed. Well, Allura did like to say that the Alteans had always believed in peace and in being the “good” part of the traditional name Rollo had just invoked. Maybe that included fixing the wagon of a pair of travelling merchants and sending them safely on their way. It wouldn’t hurt matters, at least. “I think Lance is spending more time flirting than on finding a solution to your problem. Let’s see what we can figure out…”

They had nearly completed a satisfactory patch on the wheel when the faint, haunting tone of a hunting horn reached their ears. Shiro and Lance immediately stood straight, their heads turning as one in its direction.

“What is it?” Rollo asked, dropping his tools.

The horn sounded again.

“Trouble,” Shiro said, striding around the fire to the open road. “Lance--”

“Is something out there?” Nyma asked, her eyes wide and frightened as she fisted a hand in Lance’s cloak. “Are you leaving us? But what if there are more?”

Lance looked helplessly from Shiro to the girl. The horn sounded again. They may not have time to argue.

“Lance, stay here and stand guard over them,” he ordered swiftly. “I’ll see to the others. _Do not move from this spot_ , and call if any trouble shows up, understand?”

“Yes, sir!”

Shiro charged into the growing shadows beneath the trees, trusted the darkness and foliage to cover him from view, and engaged the magic in his armor that made him faster and more resilient than any unarmored human. Even so, it would take him a few minutes to reach the others - he would just have to trust that they could hold out against whatever they had found until he arrived.

 

-

 

“You and that man, and whoever blew that horn…you’re the ghost thieves, aren’t you?”

“Well we’re not ghosts,” Lance hedged, still looking in the direction Shiro had run, still torn between offering protection to Nyma and Rollo and racing to his friends’ aid despite orders and his own inclinations, “and we’re not out to hurt people like you. We’re defenders.”

“So…you are them, then?”

He sighed.

“Yeah, you could say that,” he allowed.

“Oh.” Her hand touched his shoulder. “Lance?”

He turned his head right into a punch.

 

-

 

Shiro broke into the clearing just in time to see Keith punch out what appeared to be the last man standing of a round dozen, going by the unconscious bodies piled between the trees.

“Well,” he said, stopping to catch his breath and allowing the glow of magic in his crystal hand to fade, “looks like you had it handled after all.”

“Sorry, Shiro,” Hunk said sheepishly. “I saw Pidge get hit and I panicked.”

Shiro looked immediately to where Pidge was strapping the hilt of her bayard back to her side.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine; the armor took the worst of it. He just took me by surprise.”

“So what was all of this, then?”

“Bounty hunters,” Keith spat, kicking the man he’d knocked out over to lie face up beneath the tree. “Apparently we’ve got five hundred crowns on each of our heads, so now the forest’s going to be crawling with men out to make their fortune by capturing ghosts.”

“Where’s Lance?” Hunk asked suddenly, looking around as though he expected his friend to materialize at any moment. “He’s not usually this much slower than you.”

The gnawing feeling of something being wrong struck Shiro then.

“We found some stranded merchants - he stayed behind to protect them, just in case…”

“Well, we’d better hope that those merchants don’t know about the bounty, then, or there could be trouble,” Pidge said.

“They were this way--”

By the time they reached the campsite again, there was nothing left behind but the smoldering remains of the fire and a single hastily-repaired wheel.

 

-

 

Lance woke with a jolt - literally. The surface beneath him bounced, shaking his bones and knocking his aching head against something hard, and he peeled his eyes open to peer through the flashes of light dancing across his vision at…nothing. Just muffled darkness, full of the slightly musty smell he’d caught while working on the merchant’s cart.

Another jolt shook him, and his ears picked up the rattle of horse’s hooves and wooden wheels as he realized the cause of the faint throb in his shoulders, particularly the one he was laying on: his hands were tied. His mind quickly put the pieces together, and he didn’t like the picture he got.

The others would never let him live this down, but he’d rather he lived, so he began to stretch and strain for the pouch on his hip, bracing himself against whatever crates of goods Nyma and Rollo carried, until he’d worked the mirror free and open.

“Shiro?” he whispered. “Hunk? Pidge, Keith? Anyone there?”

There was a pause just long enough that he feared he hadn’t been heard - then, with a flash of dim light, a voice returned his call.

“Lance! Lance, where are--”

Lance hissed for quiet; the rumble of the cart was loud around him, but the last thing he wanted was for someone outside to hear.

“I’m in Rollo and Nyma’s cart,” he whispered. “I don’t know where we’re headed, and I can’t get out on my own. I think we’re still in the forest, though?”

Another jolt. The mirror bounced, as did Lance’s head.

“Owwww,” he moaned. “That felt like a tree root, definitely the forest road.”

“There’s that one section in bad repair on the way to Eberle,” he heard Pidge say in the background, “and it makes sense they’d go straight to collect the bounty, as fast as they could.”

“I don’t think they can go too fast - they’ve got a broken wheel,” Lance volunteered.

“We found their broken wheel,” Shiro replied grimly, “back at the campsite. They must’ve had a spare all along.”

“Oh.”

“I can move faster than anyone else,” Keith said. “The princess said that the red armor gives the greatest enhancements to the wearer’s speed. I can catch them.”

Lance was torn between protesting the idea that _Keith_ would be his rescuer and elation that he would most likely be rescued at all. Shiro solved his dilemma for him.

“Go.”

Lance suffered another jolt and hoped that the cavalry would be as quick as it liked to boast.

 

-

 

Rollo was not a man who believed in ghosts or fairies - he even had his doubts about magic and miracles - and so when he heard about the bounty set on the heads of the quickly-becoming-legendary ghost thieves of Keaton wood he didn’t waste time dithering over the fear of facing the undead or unnatural; he packed his things and, with Nyma, devised a plan.

The ghosts, they were certain, were only men. Canny men, wise in woodcraft and well aware of all the little secret ways through their territory which outsiders would miss so that they seemed to appear and vanish in thin air, but men all the same. And men who made a habit of thieving even well-guarded convoys through the wood could hardly be expected to resist the apparently soft target of a couple of merchants in need.

Except, apparently, they could.

Rollo had come out to lure and bag a thief for gold and a pardon. Finding a couple of guys good enough to help strangers in need and even to split up to protect those strangers against the scary things in the dark…well, that made him feel a little bad.

Then he remembered the sentence for smuggling. That made the bad feelings go away.

“Did you hear something?” Nyma said, twisting in her seat to look over the back of the wagon. Rollo listened, but his ears picked up nothing but the rattle of the cart and the quick clip of Beezer’s hooves.

“Not a thing, but keep your eyes open. We don’t know what else might--”

A flash of red caught the corner of his eye just before Nyma raised the bow from her lap, turned, and fired in one quick motion. The arrow splintered against a glowing sword; she was already flicking another from the quiver at her side and taking aim, swiveling to face almost directly backwards over the wagon as they swept further and further away from the site of the attempted ambush.

Then there was another flash of red, and the knight was alongside the front of the wagon on Rollo’s side, sword drawn back; Rollo had barely enough time to register the impossibility of this feat when the blade was thrust into the spokes and released, and then he had the more pressing matter of crunching wood and splinters and the rattling jolt of a wheel shattering and spinning off into the darkness, throwing the cart askew and flinging him off and _this would hurt--_

Something caught him, turned him in midair and transformed his fall into a tumble which fetched him some new bruises but saved his bones. By the time the world stopped spinning around his head enough for him to know what was up and what was down, his sister was beside him, Beezus was being walked back up the road - sans cart - by the one called Shiro, and the other four ‘ghosts,’ including the red one who had caught up with them and Lance himself, were staring down at him.

Rollo shut his eyes and tilted his head back against the tree.

“Well…damn.”

 

-

 

“They weren’t so bad in the end - they even wished us luck.”

“They literally kidnapped you and were going to sell you to the authorities, Lance.”

“Funny enough, _Keith_ , I remember that. I’m just saying that they maybe weren’t completely terrible after all.”

“Is that what you think, or is that what the girl’s pretty face is making you think?”

“Oh, shut up, Pidge.”

“Lance, I’m glad you’re okay, but now we need to have a talk…”

The Blue Paladin groaned, complaining all the way as he followed Shiro out to the training hall.

“Well, this news about bounties is most upsetting,” Coran said, twirling his moustache as he watched them go. “Especially since they may very well have two of your names to go with it now, depending on what those two hunters do with the knowledge.”

“We used the memory magic on our weapons, so wouldn’t they forget?”

“Yes, well, the thing is, it’s less a forgetfulness charm and more of a…befuddler,” Coran said. He quickly gained momentum. “For instance, it wouldn’t make you forget what the days of the week were, but it could make you confused as to specifically what day today was. Usually your battles have been very quick affairs - very confusing even without that magic involved - and so those brought down by it wouldn’t have remembered anything solid. Similarly, those two might be a little bewildered as to the finer details of the night, and might mix faces together in their memories a bit if they weren’t paying close attention, but they interacted calmly and at length with both Lance and Shiro, so those things may remain a bit clearer than the rest. Untangling the mysteries of the mind is more of a game of guesswork than an art, I’m afraid, so we still can’t be certain, but the possibility remains.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have let them go,” Keith said.

“And how would you have prevented them?” Coran asked. “We aren’t well-equipped for prisoners; we can’t go keeping people on a whim.”

“There’s more than just ‘befuddling’ magic in the bayards.”

“Keith, that’s cold,” Hunk said.

“I’m just saying that it’s an option, if we ever need it.”

“What’s done is done,” Allura said from the center of the hall. “And in the future…I cannot stop you from defending your lives or the lives of your fellow Paladins by deadly force. I only ask that you make that your very last resort, for when you have no other options. The Paladins are meant to be a force for the sake of peace, even in war.”

“We understand, Princess,” Pidge said softly. “We won’t let you down.”

“I know,” Allura replied. “Thank you all.”

 

-

 

No gold, but they managed to arrange a pardon for ‘accidental’ acquisition of illegal goods. It still felt a little bad, but it was better than hanging, _far_ better than watching his sister hang. Besides, it was just a couple of names that stuck out from the confusing swirl their memories of the night had become, a couple of names and one or two features: brown hair, black, a patch of white above a scarred face.

Names and features. What harm could come of that?

 

-

 

She glided down the corridor, robes whispering as they faded into the shadows cast by violet witchlight on the walls. A tall, barred door stood in her way. She gestured, and it opened to a room just large enough to hold the massive prisoner within.

“We may have an opportunity for you,” she said. “How much do you want revenge on the Champion?”

The creature stirred in the darkness and moved with a grin into the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Using Voice Actor surnames for made-up place names works, right?
> 
> Also, these adventures will not strictly follow the plot of either Voltron: Legendary Defender nor The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. Instead we'll be following a mishmash trail of this and that as it occurs to me and works with the characters at this point. And for the record, Lance's character so far seems to allow for a lot of hijinks to happen. Somebody should probably take him away from me.
> 
> Rollo and Nyma are indeed human in this AU. This will not be the case for all alien characters - some may be mythical faerie folk instead - but I did want to pull in some more humans given the structure of this alternate universe when compared to the original of VLD.
> 
> Currently working on a third chapter; hope to have it done well before next week. See you then!

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter two is complete. I plan on uploading it next week and, I hope, working on subsequent chapters in the meantime. We'll see how it goes. :)


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